why everyone blames the phones + hates their government

*spoiler: it's because of the phones

and

Mar 25, 2025

Happy Tuesday everyone! 💙

Hope you’re all feeling fresh and funkadelic, or at the very least not vaguely hungover like I am. Bless my best friend, but a Monday night birthday dinner?! The things we do for the ones we love, eh? Allison Hammond (woman, myth, British legend) was at the table beside us and joined in a very enthusiastic rendition of HAPPY BIRTHDAY when the cake arrived, which was really sweet!

Anyway. In this week’s edition we’ll be touching on stories about Netflix’s new hit show Adolescence, why people everywhere believe their government is failing, why we should all avoid pay later apps like Afterpay and Klarna, and whether the booming gut-health program ZOE is actually legit.

As per, there are more juicy stories woven in where these came from, so let’s dive in!

🤳 Society

Why has ‘Adolescence’ had such an impact? – thred
Netflix’s new hit show highlights ‘male rage’ and how it’s emerging in young boys in new and complex ways amid rising social media use. While, of course, parents play a central role in the shaping young children, the show sheds light on powerful new influences present in young boy’s lives, ones that can drastically impact their decision-making. The four part series exposes how older generations – parents, grandparents, teachers, all the usual pillars of influence in children’s lives – are often completely unaware of the world within their child’s phone. Adolescence is a call to action for adults to take a more active role in young people’s lives, to try to be more aware of what they’re doing online, and to keep a keen eye out for dangerous digital trends.

One big reason for fewer babies: phones? – vox
Everyone’s freaking out about declining birth rates. While there are several known causes for this downward trend, the most prominent is better reproductive rights for women, who are also earning their own incomes and deprioritising marriage for economic stability, instead marrying for love - which is getting trickier to find. In America, half of 18- to 34-year-olds are neither in a steady relationship nor living with a partner. Most single Americans feel no pressure to find a partner, and half say they’re not even looking. On top of this, hyper-engaging online entertainment is making young people more isolated than ever. Technology and media are distracting us, driving this digital solitude, ultimately preventing couples from forming. This article poses this as a problem and asks whether we can regulate technology in some way, introduce restrictions on its use, or foster better social skills through programs in schools to change this downward trend in togetherness… and population growth.

🌍 World

Oscar-winning Palestinian director is attacked by Israeli settlers and detained by the army – npr
Hamdan Ballal, co-director and filmmaker of the Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land, was one of three Palestinians detained in the village of Susiya on Monday. A group of Israeli settlers beat the trio in the occupied West Bank before they were detained by the Israeli military, according to two of Ballal’s fellow directors and other present witnesses. "We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us," Adra told The Associated Press. "This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment."

Why everyone thinks their government has failed – the atlantic
In 2024, incumbent parties lost ground all over the world, whether they were right-wing or left-wing, moderate or radical, competent or incompetent, rich or poor. Are voters’ expectations changing or have governments become less able to deliver on their promises? Could it be both? This article suggests that political dissatisfaction is rising in tandem with the “three Ps”: populism, polarisation, and post-truth. The last p is particularly important. Social media platforms afford us a look into how others live, keeping us aware of who has it better, and of the achievements that elude us but that others have fulfilled. On these same platforms, people vent their personal frustrations, making them more visible and politically potent to others. In a world where gate-kept media that filters extreme views and moderates discontent is gone for good, this article suggests political discontent may be hear to stay. Especially when governments will struggle to overcome society’s ever-evolving expectations shaped by the new information age.

🎨 Culture

Pharrell Williams celebrates Black femininity in new Paris art show – euronews
Pharrell Williams is exploring the enduring impact of Black women – “the artists who transform the world through the power of their hands” – through a new exhibition called FEMMES. Described as ‘eclectic and expansive,’ it features 40 cross generation artists who explore the many facets of black womanhood including body, fashion, motherhood, activism, queerness and spirituality. They do so through multiple media including photography, painting and textile art. The exhibition will be on show between March 20 and April 19 at Perrotin in Paris, France.

Timbaland’s AI reinvention: ‘God presented this tool to me’ – rolling stone
Timbaland is the legendary man behind songs like Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado and Apologise by OneRepublic. For a solid decade, he was all hits, no misses… but eventually, Timbaland started to disappear from the charts. Now 54 years old, the hitmaker is returning to music-making using a controversial new tool: an AI music generator that’s currently facing a lawsuit from all of the record industry’s major labels for using of countless copyrighted songs in its training data. “God presented this tool to me. I probably made a thousand beats in three months, and a lot of them — not all — are bangers, and from every genre you can possibly think of.… I just did four K-pop songs this morning!” he tells Rolling Stone in an exclusive interview. Whether fans they’re hits will be another question.

💰 E-commerce

Don’t use a payment plan when you order a burrito. Seriously. – business insider
This article is essentially a call to us all: STOP USING AFTERPAY/KLARNA!!! These payment plan services may seem like an easy and clever way to get what we want while worrying about the cost of them later. In reality, these companies are only setting us up to be in debt in the future. Their entire business model hinges on customers forgetting to pay their monthly debts off, so that their interest payments rise. Now that Afterpay is integrated on delivery apps like DoorDash, customers will be able to buy now, pay later on food orders. But perhaps we should all ask ourselves if going into debt for a burrito, burger, or bubble tea is really worth it…

ZOE, a British personal-nutrition app, is growing fast – economist
Hundreds of thousands of people now pay £25 a month (on top of a £300 joining fee) for ZOE, the personal-nutrition app focused on gut health… famous for their neon blue cookie. The startup is raking in serious dough, earning £66m in the year up to August 2024, an eleven-fold increase on its first year of trading in 2022. ZOE has homed in on widespread surging interest in the links between diet and gut health, using AI to derive insights from users’ data and an algorithm to generate personalised advice. Despite backing from prominent influencers and a wildly popular ZOE-made podcast, scientists aren’t convinced that continuous glucose monitoring and personalised diets are any better than general healthy-eating advice. In a nutshell, the app may be leading the ‘worried well’ to obsess pointlessly over trivial health data.

💬 Recommendation

a quote worth thinking about by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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